[This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]
[Go to Part 1 of Words about sex and gender]
Excursus: Eng. male and Eng. female
Introduction
As we saw in an earlier section, the appearance of the new
sense of the word gender, namely gender4, has resulted
in those who subscribe to that sense of the word redefining a number of other words,
such as man/woman and boy/girl. These words used to
be sex-based (biological) categories but are now being reinterpreted as being
defined in terms of personal or individual identity, not biology. This
has led to other words, such as the words male and female, which
traditionally focus on sex, though not only, in contexts in which the former words
were used.
The English words male and female were
originally adjectives but they can now be used as nouns as well for the two
biological options in question. They are much more general in their application
than the terms man and woman ever were, of course, since they apply
to most biological organisms that reproduce sexually.[1]
In this section we are going to look at these two words and their Spanish
equivalents. Some of these words are cognates or quasi cognates, and some are unrelated.
Eng. male
The English word male, today pronounced [ˈmeɪ̯ɫ], homophonous with the word mail, was borrowed
from French in the 14th century, more specifically from the Anglo-Norman dialect
of Old French. Eng. male is first attested in writing in in the late
14th century. In Old French, this word is attested in writing as either male,
masle, or mascle (cf. Modern French mâle). The French word
is first attested in the 12th century and it is a patrimonial word in that
language. It descends by patrimonial (uninterrupted, oral) transmission from Lat.
mascŭlus (mas‑cŭl‑us), with word-initial
(antepenultimate) stress, which is the Latin diminutive form of the noun mās
‘man, male’, which could also be used as an adjective meaning ‘male, masculine,
manly’. Lat. mascŭlus could also be used as
a noun or an as an adjective, with meanings very similar to those of the base word
mās.
The genitive wordform of this Latin lexeme was mar‑is,
which reveals that the word’s regular stem is mar‑. This same root is found
in other Latin words, such as Lat. marītus ‘adj. marital,
matrimonial, conjugal; noun husband, married man’ (mar‑īt‑us),
the source of Eng. marital (as in marital status = Sp. estado
civil) and Sp. marido ‘husband’, for example. (Another word that has
been suggested to contain the word mās
is Lat. masturbārī ‘to masturbate’, though that is questionable.) Derived
from Lat. mascŭlus is the Latin
adjective mascŭlīnus/a
(mas‑cŭl‑īn‑us/a)
derived by means of the derivational suffix ‑īn‑ (cf. Part I, Chapter
8), which has been borrowed by English and Spanish as Eng. masculine ~
Sp. masculino/a (see below).
|
mās (gen.: mar‑is) |
|
‘noun man,
male’ |
|
mās |
+ ‑cŭl‑us/a |
mascŭlus/a ‘adj. male,
masculine; manly, virile’ |
|
mās |
+cŭl+‑īn‑us/a |
mascŭlīnus/a ‘adj. masculine;
manly’ |
Eng. male is, as we said, primarily an
adjective. Dictionaries differ as to how they break up the senses of this
adjective. In COED, the primary meaning refers to biology, namely: ‘of or denoting
the sex that can fertilize or inseminate the female to produce offspring’.
Derived from that sense is a subsense: ‘relating to or characteristic of men or
male animals’ (COED). Of course, if the word male is defined in terms of
the word man and man is defined in terms of identity and not
biology, that makes the word male will not refer exclusively to
biological males, unless a modifier such as biological is used along
with it. Also derived from this primary sense is, according to COED, a sense in
which the adjective male is used for plants or flowers.[2]
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (10e, 2020) gives
five senses for the adjective male. Interestingly, the first one of
these senses is not necessarily a biological category: ‘being a man or boy’
(OALD), as in a male friend/colleague/partner. Thus, if we define man
and boy in terms of identity and not biology, then male could
also an identity-based term, not a biology-based one. The second sense of the
adjective male is a biological one, namely ‘belonging to the sex that does
not lay eggs or give birth to babies’ (OALD), as used in expressions such as male
bird or male hormones. The third sense is also not necessarily about
biology: ‘of men; typical of men; affecting men’ (OALD), as in traditionally
male interests. The fourth sense is the one about plants and the fifth one
is about plugs and other connectors in which the male connector goes into the
female. Note that the first and third senses may result in speakers using the word
male as an identity category, not as a biological one.
As we said, the adjective male can also be used as a
noun to refer to ‘a male person, animal, or plant’ (COED), as in the sentence The
male of the species has a white tail (OALD), or as often seen in
police reports, as in The body is that of a white male aged about 40
(OALD). The noun use of Eng. male does seem to be more closely
associated with biology than identity, at least in common usage.
Sp. macho and Sp. varón
Spanish
has a cognate of Eng. male, namely Sp. macho, a patrimonial word
that also descends from Lat. mascŭlus, the same word that Eng.
male ultimate comes from, which is why we call them cognates (cf. Part I, Chapter
1). The sound changes involved in the development from Lat. mascŭlus to Sp. macho
are the expected ones in this language (cf. Part I, Chapter 10). First, the
intertonic vowel ŭ was
lost, an extremely common sound change, resulting in masclus. Secondly, the
scl [skl] consonant cluster was reduced to ch [ʧ]. This is not a very common
sound change, since this consonant cluster itself was not common and always resulted
from the loss of a vowel in a Latin word, but it is definitely attested in
Spanish: cl [k’l] > ch [ʧ] when preceded by a consonant (cf. Part I, Chapter 10,
§10.4.7.2,
). Another example is Late Lat. cŏncŭla
(diminutive of Lat. conc(h)a ‘mussle shell, etc.’) > Sp. concha ‘shell’.
Note that the wordforms maslo and masclo for this word are also
attested in writing in Old Spanish (DCEH), though the variant macho ended
up displacing them.[3]
Although the cognates Eng. male ~ Sp. macho
share a core meaning, the two words are not used the same way in each of these
languages, even though bilingual dictionaries often give the impression that
the two words are equivalent. First of all, Sp. macho is used primarily
for animals (other than humans) only, much like preñada ‘pregnant’ is
used for animals (other than humans), unlike its English cognate pregnant (cf.
Part II, Chapter 7).
Sp. macho is used as a modifier in a number of non-noun compounds such
as liebre macho ‘buck hare’, gato macho ‘tomcat’, ballena macho
‘bull whale’, and elefante macho ‘bull elephant’. The word macho in
these phrases is still a noun, however, and thus it is invariant in these noun-noun
compounds and thus, for example, the plural of ballena macho is ballenas
macho, not *ballenas machos (cf. Part I, Chapter 5,
§5.8.3.3).
Note that in the expression macho cabrío ‘he-goat, billy goat’, macho
is the main noun and cabrío is an adjective derived from cabra ‘goat’,
and so its plural is machos cabríos.[4]
To the extent that Sp. macho is used for (male)
humans, this only happens in a few dialectal, informal, and figurative
contexts. María Moliner gives the following as the fifth sense (of 14) for this
word: ‘having the qualities that are considered typical of the male sex, such as
strength and courage’ (MM).[5]
This definition obviously revolves around stereotypes of maleness and
not around male identity. The Spanish language academies’ (ASALE) dictionary
(Diccionario de la lengua española, or DLE) gives 17 senses for Sp. macho
but none of them is like the sense of Eng. male that refers to human males.
Actually, most of the senses of Sp. macho in the DLE are archaic or even
obsolete.
An example of macho being used in the context of
human males is found in parts of central Spain where the word macho is
used as an appellative among men, much like man or dude is used in
parts of the English-speaking world, cf. sense 7: ‘masculine, colloquial, used
to address a person of the male sex, e.g., ¡Déjame en paz, macho! ‘Leave
me alone, man!’.[6]
Of course, we cannot ignore the fact that English has
borrowed the word macho from Spanish, with the sense ‘masculine or vigorous’,
‘tough guy’, something that happened in the 1920s. LDCE defines Eng. macho
as ‘behaving in a way that is traditionally typical of men, for example being strong
or brave, or not showing your feelings – used humorously or in order to show disapproval’
(LDCE). Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate defines it as ‘characterized by machismo:
aggressively virile’ (MWC). The (English) phrase macho man, first
attested in 1959, is a ‘colloquial (freq. depreciative)’ way to refer to ‘a man
characterized by (esp. exaggeratedly) assertive masculinity’ (OED). Some deride
such use of Spanish words in English, labeling it mock Spanish.[i]
As you can see in this last definition, a word derived from macho
in Spanish by means of the suffix ‑ismo ‘-ism’, Sp. machismo, has
also been borrowed by English. COED defines Eng. machismo as ‘strong or aggressive
masculine pride’ (COED). The DLE defines machismo as ‘arrogant attitude of men
towards women’ and ‘type of sexism characterized by male prevalence’.[7]
In Spanish, for every word ending in ‑ismo there is a
related word ending in ‑ista, derived with the also Greek suffix ‑ista
‘‑ist’. Thus, from Sp. machismo we have the word machista ‘adj./n.
sexist; n. male chauvinist’, a word that is even more common than machismo,
but one that has not been borrowed by English. It is used in phrases such as una
sociedad machista ‘a sexist society’ (Clave), Tiene una ideología machista
‘He has a male chauvinist ideology’ (Larousse), Tu amigo es un machista descarado
‘Your friend is a blatant male chauvinist’ (Larousse), or una concepción machista
de la sociedad ‘a sexist approach to society’ (Vox).
The noun macho is often used by itself to refer to
certain animals, in particular the billy goat and, in eastern Cuba, the male
pig. Sp. macho is used in some dialects of Spanish to refer to a ‘(male)
mule’ too (Sp. mulo). According to the DLE this word macho is the
same word as the macho that we have just been discussing, but other
sources claim that this is an unrelated homonym, one that probably comes from
Portuguese macho (same meaning), earlier muacho, derived from muo
(Modern Port. mu), a word that descends from Lat. mūlus, the source of Sp. mulo
and Eng. mule (DCEH).[8]
The word macho is obviously not the best
option for translating Eng. male into Spanish. So, how should we
translate this word’s most basic and common sense used for describing humans,
as opposed to animals. English-Spanish dictionaries give us a couple of
options, as we can see in Table 209.
The main one is varón, though there are other minor options
used in some contexts, such as masculino/a when referring to certain
things such as hormones or organs. The English adjective male can also
be translated by the adjectives varonil (derived, in Spanish, from varón
by means of the adjectival suffix Lat. -īl‑is that formed adjectives
from nouns) and viril ‘virile, manly’ (a learned descendant from Lat. vĭrīlis ‘male; virile,
manly’, an adjective derived from vĭr ‘man, male human’ and Lat. -īl‑is).
|
male
|
Table 209: The word male into Spanish in Vox
English-Spanish dictionary
We should note that as an adjective, Eng. male often
needs no translation when the Spanish word has masculine gender. Thus, for example,
a male nurse is an enfermero, just like a female nurse is an enfermera.
But even when the word does not reflect any gender, it may not be necessary to
indicate its gender by means of an adjective if other words, such as articles
and demonstrative adjectives do the job. So, for example, and a male model is un
modelo and a female model is una modelo.[9]
Here the indefinite article un/una is enough to indicate the
individual’s gender.
The word varón is an interesting one since its origin
is not clear. In Latin, we find what may two different words that could have
been its source. One is classical vāro (genitive: vārōnis;
regular stem: vārōn‑) ‘a stupid, boorish fellow, a clodpate’ (L&S).
This word is also found with the following alternative spellings: varrō,
barrō, and bārō. The origin of this word is unknown, though it is
most likely a loanword. Another possible source of Sp. varón is Lat. barō
(genitive: barōnis; regular stem: barōn‑). An alternative
spelling is barrō (genitive: barrōnis). It is not clear if the a
in this word was long or short, hence sometimes we encounter the word
written as bā̆rō in academic texts. This word was clearly a loan from a
Germanic language, perhaps from Frankish. In Late Latin, this word meant ‘man, freeman’,
as well as ‘mercenary soldier’ (according to Isidore of Seville), but in
Medieval Latin it came to be used as a nobility title with the meaning that its
descendants Eng. baron and Sp. barón have. The title is most
commonly used in the French and English traditions. In Spain, it was used in
the Catalan nobility tradition which, like the English one, was influenced by
the French tradition. In English, a baron is ‘a member of the lowest order of the
British nobility’ (COED). In Spanish, a barón is a ‘person who has a title
of nobility immediately below that of viscount’ (Clave).[10]
Again, it is not clear to etymologists which one of these
words is the source of Sp. varón. Most sources, such as DCEH, think that
Sp. varón probably has the same origin as the word barón ‘baron’,
the nobility title, even though it is spelled with a v, a minor matter since
the two letters are pronounced the same way in Spanish (cf. Part I, Chapter 7)
and thus was not uncommon for Old Spanish words to be spelled with the wrong
letter. Other sources prefer to be non-commital about the word’s source. The
DLE, for example, tells us that Sp. varón comes from Lat. vāro (gen.
varōnis),
but do not specify which of the two Latin words they imply. It is not clear if
the DLE refers here to the classical word vāro or the Frankish barō,
for according to this dictionary the original Latin word’s meaning was ‘strong,
energetic, hard-working’ (‘fuerte, esforzado’), which would make it an
adjective and not a noun and, besides, there is no record of such a Latin
adjective in other sources.
Eng. female & Sp. hembra
The
antonym of Eng. male is Eng. female [ˈfi.ˌmeɪ̯ɫ]. At first sight, one
would think that the word female is related to and derived from the word
male, by the addition of a mysterious ‘prefix’ fe‑, just like the
word woman is actually based on and derived from the word man,[11]
but this would be an incorrect etymological analysis. The word woman is
indeed derived from the word man. It was an Old English compound word
formed with the words wif (the source of Modern English wife), which
at the time meant just ‘woman’ (not just ‘married woman’), and man,
which at the time meant just ‘person’ (of either sex).
Eng. female,
on the other hand, is not historically or etymologically related to the word male.
It is a loanword from an Anglo-Norman (Old French) word variously spelled female,
femaile, or femell, which descended from classical Latin fēmella
‘girl, young woman’, which is a somewhat irregular diminutive of the word fēmĭna (with word-initial, or
antepenultimate stress) ‘woman, wife; female (of animals)’, which is itself an
ancient word, a descendant from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning something
like ‘breastfeeder’, derived from a verb meaning ‘to suck, to suckle’. The
ending ‑ell‑a was a common diminutive suffix in Latin (the
masculine form was ‑ell‑us), which had other variants,
such as ‑ul‑us/a and ‑cul‑us/a, originally
‑l‑us/a.[12]
Another variant of this diminutive suffix is ‑ill‑us/a/um,
the source of the Spanish diminutive suffix ‑illo/a.
In some Romance languages, such as French, descendants of
the Latin diminutive fēmella took on the meaning—and replaced the descendants of—Lat. fēmĭna.
This did not happen in Spanish, however. Lat. fēmella never made it into
Spanish, but the word that it is derived from, fēmĭna, did.[13]
It was a patrimonial word that underwent a number of sound changes along the
way, resulting in the Modern Spanish word hembra (the derivation is
explained in Part I, Chapter 10, §10.4.2.1
and §10.4.7.3,
and Part II, Chapter 16,
§16.3.2).
Actually, the Spanish equivalent for Eng. female is
indeed the noun hembra, but nowadays mostly only when referring to
animals and plants. So, for example the Oxford English-Spanish gives us
the following example: a female elephant — un elefante hembra, una
hembra de elefante (OSD). (As in the case of macho, seen in the preceding
section, hembra here is used as a modifying noun and it is invariant.) Some
dialects of Spanish use hembra to refer to human females and that was
probably the norm in earlier forms of Spanish. In technical language, referring
to plugs and other connectors, female also translates mostly as hembra,
e.g., female connector translates as conector hembra, which is the
opposite of conector macho ‘male connector’.
Most Spanish dialects today, however, do not translate Eng. female
as hembra, just like they do not use the adjective preñada
‘pregnant’ for women, only for animals. The preferred translation of female
when talking about human females involves the noun mujer ‘lit. woman’
or, if it is about a young female, niña or some synonym of this word.
So, for instance, the Oxford English-Spanish dictionary gives us the
following example: the victim was female — la víctima era una mujer.
Another example is seen in the preferred translation of female impersonator,
namely persona disfrazada de mujer. When female is used as a
modifier (‘adjective’), it often translates as femenino/a, so that female
circumcision translates as circuncisión femenina or ablación del clitoris
(Harraps), female condom as preservative/condón femenino (Harraps),
female (sexual) organs as órganos (sexuales) femeninos, female
instinct as instinto femenino, female sexual dysfunction as disfunción
sexual de la mujer or disfunción sexual femenina, and female
genitalia translates as genitales femeninos or genitales de mujer.
Still, as we mentioned earlier in the case of male, this English word
may not need to be translated at all if the word itself has gender marking, as
in the word enfermera, which means ‘female nurse’, or the word bibliotecaria,
which means ‘female librarian’ (bibliotecario is ‘male librarian’).
[1] In
sentences such as Their child is male or It’s a male child, the
word male is being used as an adjective. However, now one can also say
things like Their child is a male where the word male is used as
a noun, as the preceding article and the accompanying noun child
indicate. Other examples of the word male being used as a noun are: The
males are bigger or Males need not apply.
[2] Another
sense, already found in post-classical Latin as a calque from its Greek
equivalent ᾰ̓́ρσην (ársēn), is ‘(of a plant or flower)
bearing stamens but lacking functional pistils’ (COED).
[3] A doublet
of Sp. concha in which the change has not happened still remains in the language,
namely cuenca ‘basin, socket’. English does have a related, technical word
concha, which comes from the non-diminutive Lat. concha. The ch
in this word is not pronounced [ʧ]
but rather [k]. That is because this ch is a transliteration of Ancient Greek χ [kh], for the Latin word is a loan from
Greek κόγχη (kónkhē) ‘mussel or
cockle; shell-like cavity’.
[4] Sp. cabrón,
masculine augmentative of Sp. cabra ‘goat’, was originally a noun, synonym
of macho cabrio. Today it is merely used as an insult and term of abuse,
though dictionaries still give ‘billy goat’ as one of the word’s meanings, even
the first meaning sometimes. The two main meanings of the noun/adjective cabrón
are ‘(person) who plays dirty tricks or is annoying’ (‘Que hace malas pasadas o
resulta molesto’, DLE) and ‘man whose wife is unfaithful, especially if he consents
to it’ (‘Se dice del hombre al que su mujer es infiel, y en especial si lo
consiente’, DLE).
[5]
Original: ‘Con las cualidades que se consideran propias del sexo masculino, como
la fuerza y la valentía’ (MM).
[6]
Original: ‘7. m. coloq. U. para dirigirse a una persona de sexo masculino. ¡Déjame
en paz, macho!’
[7]
Original: ‘1. m. Actitud de prepotencia de los varones respecto de las
mujeres. 2. m. Forma de sexismo
caracterizada por la prevalencia del varón. En la designación de directivos
de la empresa hay un claro machismo.’
[8] Do note
that there is yet a third word macho in Spanish, homonymous with the
other two, whose two main meanings are ‘big mallet that is in the blacksmiths to
forge iron’ (‘mazo grande que hay en las herrerías para forjar el hierro’) and
‘bench in which blacksmiths have a small anvil’ (‘banco en que los herreros tienen
el yunque pequeño’) (DLE). This word is of uncertain origin, but it probably it
comes from Mozarabic.
[9] The noun
modelo has common gender (Sp. género común), so that its ending
does not change according to gender, even though it ends in ‑o. This
word is a late 16th century loanword from Italian modello, a descendant
from Vulgar Latin *modĕllus,
diminutive and synonym of Lat. modulus ‘a small measure or interval,
etc.’, itself a diminutive of Lat. modus ‘measure; manner, way’.
[10] Original:
‘Persona que tiene un título nobiliario inmediatamente inferior al de vizconde’
(Clave). Note that another sense has developed for barón in Spanish political
discourse, for example, namely ‘In a political party, a person who has an
important position and is a candidate for prominent positions’ (original: ‘En
un partido político, persona que tiene una posición importante y es candidata a
puestos destacados’, Clave).
[11] The
word for ‘male person’ in Old English was wer, as in werewolf ‘male
wolf’, but this word became obsolete when the word man came to be used
to mean ‘male person’ and replaced it. Old Eng. wer is cognate of Lat. vir
‘man’, whose root vir is still found in word such as Eng. virile
~ Sp. viril and Eng. virtue ~ Sp. virtud.
[12] When
the base to which the suffix ‑l‑us/a was added ended in ‑ra‑/‑ro‑,
‑na‑/‑no‑, or ‑la‑/‑lo‑, this resulted in some
interesting sound changes, e.g. cerebrum ‘brain’ → cerebellum
‘a small brain’, corōna
‘garland, wreath, crown’ → corōlla ‘little crown, garland’, porcus
‘pig’ → porculus ‘young pig, little pig, piglet’ → porcellus ‘little
pig, piglet’ (WT), cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-lus#Latin.
[13] Catalan
is another language that did receive the Latin diminutive fēmella resulting
in Cat. femella, meaning ‘female’, but only when applied to non-human
animals (the antonym of Cat. mascle, cognate of Sp. macho). Cat. femella
also means ‘nut’ (fastener with a threaded hole).
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